Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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The grumbling around Twitter is about its continued quarterly losses and how it's not fulfilling the expected ROI from the $2.8 billion invested.

Not relevant to puzzling out the losses is explaining all the other "cool" things about Twitter such as "giving people a voice" or "a broadcasting platform for journalists/celebrities/revolutionists/politicians". That's emotional analysis instead of financial analysis.

The common defenses of Twitter often has the same flaws in writing structure:

1) Ignore the billions invested and repeated losses on the balance sheet

2) Then point out some amazing feature or undeniable human benefit that stirs the emotions and imagination

Examples...

I don't get the narrative and negativity about Iridium/Motorola satellite phone service?! Who wouldn't want the ability to make global phone calls from the middle of the ocean, Antarctica, and Mt Everest?! Humanity needs a phone like that! Well, all those cool things don't matter, the company went bankrupt.

I don't get the narrative around the Concorde supersonic airplane? Who wouldn't wouldn't value the ability to fly New York to London in 3 hours instead of 6?! Well, the airlines cancelled the program after financial analysis showed it barely broke even or lost money.

Idea for blog quality improvement: Instead of talking up the positive features of whatever company product, explain how the monetary numbers can work out.

I agree, but beware the sunk-cost fallacy. What matters is whether Twitter could turn a profit today. If so, the original investors may lose money and the company might even go bankrupt, but the service should still survive.

(This is why Iridium is still around but the Concorde isn't.)

you would think a VC - out of the average person out there - would, you know, kinda sorta pay attention to the numbers, maybe?

but it seems they just throw stacks of bills at targets and hope that one of them sticks

you would think a non VC - compared to a seasoned professional with a great track record - would, you know, kinda sorta pay attention to what the seasoned professional says, maybe?

But it seems they just throw out unthoughtful comments and hope that someone falls for it.

> The grumbling around Twitter is about its continued quarterly losses

That, plus how hard it is to use. Twitter is the only product of the social era that ever interested me, but I almost only ever read things. Every time I think about actually posting to it, I'm daunted. It's Byzantine.

It seems unfair to me, though, that they don't get to count read-only users as active for purposes of demonstrating growth. I'm definitely an active user, but (an ex-Twitterer explained to me) apparently people like us don't count. That seems seriously wrong, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture).

I feel like I must be missing something, because I see this argument a lot, but I don't get it. How is it too hard to post? You type the words you want to say into the box, and click the button.

I saw the "missing manual" article that went around the other day, and I agree they have way too many bizarre and undocumented behaviors, but you can ignore that stuff 99% of the time and be fine.

Edit: I should add, this is a genuine question. I really do want to understand what people find hard about posting on Twitter.

Being a "read-only" Twitter user, I don't think it's about the technical difficulty of posting to Twitter (definitely if you're posting to Hacker News, you're not going to have problems knowing how to post to Twitter), but rather, the futility of it.

Twitter, to me at least, seems like a platform for relatively influential people / people who have a pretty unique insight on something happening real-time to post. If I post on Twitter, I get maybe a few likes and retweets, and nothing else. On facebook, or reddit, or even here, I'm far more likely to feel like a part of a conversation rather than a lone voice yelling into a sea of a million people.

This definitely resonates with me. I've been a Twitter user since the very early days. Early on, I could tweet something (even something mundane) and get dozens of replies. More if it was something interesting. These days, no matter how interesting the Tweet, I'm lucky to get 2-3 responses (including likes). Clearly I'm not an unbiased judge of the quality of my Tweets, but by any measure I'm finding it MUCH harder to get responses these days.

One easy thing to do is to start a discussion with someone non-famous who responded to someone you read. Often you'll get a nice conversation out of it.

I'm sure there's strategies and whatnot that can help you grow your audience / influence. And if you're using Twitter for marketing purposes, then great.

The point is that I, and I'm sure a lot of people, aren't interested in that. I want to have interesting conversations, and I'm going to gravitate to posting on platforms that allow those conversations to happen without having to do unnatural things to start them off.

[this is a tweet]

[@zippergz this is a tweet]

[this is a tweet for @zippergz]

I have no idea if these are different. I know my followers get to see the first example. But do they get to see the others?

I have no idea what happens if I post these as a reply to a tweet that you posted. Do I need to keep the @ handle in there? Or is it being a reply sufficient to trigger an alert on your end?

I just now got followed by a porn account. So, I'm not interested in the porn they produce, and I'm never going to tweet to them. Either they're spammers who are just following everyone, or they've seen some sex industry relevant tweets I've retweeted (because another person I followed researches the sex industry) and thought I'm worth following. I have no way of knowing. So do I block them? Or just ignore them?

a friend who recently took up twitter ran into this exact thing. here's what happened, they had figured out that you just write stuff in the text box and press enter. great. simple. done!

here's what happened though, they started a tweet with @nameoffriend and noticed that unlike their previous tweets that were just words, this new tweet they wrote and sent didn't show up in their timeline like the others.

so she wrote another, thinking that for some reason it hadn't been successful. nope. again, it didn't show up.

so after the fourth duplicate message which started with @nameoffriend she gave up in exasperation and said, this is stupid!

she was later informed that all her messages which started with @nameoffriend had in fact been sent but she wasn't seeing them until she clicked on the tab tweets and replies category

it is this sort of thing that makes twitter's UX just atrocious for the average person

of course, many people on HN will read the above and chuckle but you have to understand that the average person out there is not nearly as tech savvy or nearly as invested. they will not commit to dedicating 100's of hours to learn the intricacies of a specific UI. no way!

if it is badly designed and made so that they can't use it in the first or second try, they get frustrated and just leave, and go where they can interact without the UI tripping them up, which is what you're seeing in twitter's stats

Oh yes, the typing something into the big box and publishing it part is obvious, but that's part of my problem.

The interface seems Byzantine to me in general. As long as I'm just reading, I do the two or three things I know how to do and leave the rest of it be. When I think about actually posting something, though, the stakes are higher (since if I do something dumb it will now be public), and that pre-existing general discomfort causes me to back down.

I'm sure I'd feel the same way about a power tool that had lots of complicated switches and might kill me.

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